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It’s a rare rare thing when I get the desire for soup. I’m not a soup gal, never have been. However I do love my veggies and something nice and warm. This isn’t really the traditional soup. It has a bit of a curry flair to it since it has turmeric in it. You know how good turmeric and ginger are for inflammation? Excellent!! Plus all these veggies?! Can’t go wrong. The taste is great too!

Oh and speaking of turmeric, if you use a spoon that isn’t metal or stain resistant, you will have a spoon that is orange on the bottom. Consider yourself warned!

Also, if there are some vegetables you don’t like in this, don’t add them! It’s a really flexible recipe. I’ve made it with butternut squash in, also with no cauliflower or broccoli. I’ve tossed in some lentils or quinoa or even bean sprouts. Have fun!!

My picture is after I had let the soup sit for several hours and I had it again for dinner. So the colors started meld together a lot more.

In a medium-large pot saute onion, garlic carrot and red pepper in coconut oil.
Cook until onions become clear, then add the broth, heat to a low simmer.
Now add the zucchini, celery, and cauliflower simmer (low) until they are only slightly tender.
Next put in the almond-coconut milk or whatever nondairy milk you prefer to use, along with the coconut butter.
Now add in the broccoli, cabbage and whatever green you chose. Shortly after it’s time for the lime juice, cumin, salt, aminos, turmeric, ginger and half of the sliced green onions. Stir all together until spiced are dissolved.
Mix in well, then turn off the heat, sprinkle in cayenne pepper. If you like it hot, you can add more cayenne.
Allow to sit for 5 min. Serve and garnish green onion and mint.

Hint: If you like something to taste more like garlic, add the garlic closer to the end. The longer it cooks, the less potent the taste is. Same goes for if you are using fresh gingerroot. Sometimes I do the majority in the beginning and then add another little bit before the ending.

I adore ice cream and all things that behave similar to ice cream. So, frozen bananas blended with other stuff that end up seeming like ice cream, count me in. This is an easy blender recipe with not many ingredients, keep things simple.

After it was all blended, I put it back in the freezer for 30 min to harden a bit more

ready to eat

now REALLY ready to eat! Topped with cacao nibs and mulberries

2 frozen bananas, in chunks

1/4 cup (or less) rolled oats (I did less)

1/2 cup ice cubes

1/4 cup nondairy milk of choice

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup (or less) nondairy chocolate chips

optional 10-15 drops of vanilla stevia

Toss everything except the chocolate chips in the blender and blend. I used a Blendtec Twister Jar and the ice cream setting on the blender, worked out perfect. If you don’t have that, any other high powered blender will work, you just may have to turn off the blender to scrape down the sides then turn it back on again couple of times. Blend until smooth, put the chocolate chips in and blend for about 5 seconds.

I put mine in the freezer after I made it, to harden up a little bit while I was cleaning up my mess and such. I topped it with cacao nibs and dried mulberries too!

p.s. if you haven’t had dried mulberries over ice cream/smoothie bowls/acai bowls/etc, you should! They get hard and crunchy and are amazing!

This can be used as a pizza (flavored) dip, or a spread. Of course, it’s vegan and gluten free, but it’s also raw, nut free and oil free. It goes great as a dip with random veggies. I like it with bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and celery. Of course it’s fabulous with crackers or chips as well.

Tonight I made a raw pizza and used this as the spread over the crust and then topped it with a bunch of pizza type veggies. It was perfect for it! Plus, quite easy to make. So of course, had to make sure to share the recipe here!

Ingredients

1 cup sundried tomatoes (not in oil), soaked in 2/3-3/4 cup water

2/3 cup saved sundried tomato soak water

1/4 cup raw sunflower seeds (shelled)

1/4 cup raw pepitas/shelled pumpkin seeds

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1/3 cup fresh basil

3 cherry tomatoes

juice from 1/2 lemon

1 TBS coconut aminos

1/2 tsp oregano

1/4 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/4 tsp ground black pepper

Instructions:

Soak the sun dried tomatoes in warm water for about 20 min, longer if you have really hard tomatoes. Save the soak water because you will use it in the recipe. Put all the ingredients into a food processor or blender. Process until everything is all mixed in. It will be mildly thick. Feel free to add more soak water if you want it thinned out more.

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Thought I would share my raw pizza process too. I got a wRAWp raw pizza crust this week at Mother’s Market (Grocery Store here in Orange County) and was excited to test em out! Random sidenote: wRAWp is a SoCal company. I liked the crust, it certainly doesn’t taste like real pizza, but I was impressed at how well it held up, while not being hard/crunchy. I thought that after spreading the pizza dip over it and letting it sit for over 30 min that it would begin to get semi soggy. Nope. Held up just great.

When you make a RAW pizza, you want to make sure you slice your veggies thin, it makes it easier to eat and seem more like ‘pizza’. On my pizza I used the pizza spread, torn massaged kale, red bell pepper, grape tomatoes, shallot and basil then sprinkled some oregano and black pepper over the top.

I love kale chips, so does my husband. He hadn’t had them store bought until sometime after eating my homemade ones. After having several different brands from the store and him not really liking them, he asked why I kept buying them instead of making them when what I made was way better.

Rip the Kale into about 3 inch pieces, removing the spine. Place in a large bowl.

In a blender or food processor put the rest of the ingredients together & blend until nice and smooth.

Pour over kale pieces and work in with your hands, making sure that each piece has the cheeze covering it. Allow to sit for at least 20 minutes to “soak in”. After, just lay out on dehydrator trays and dehydrate for about 10 hours at 115 degrees.

p.s. if you taste the cheeze, who am I kidding, WHEN you taste the cheese out of the blender, it will taste a bit different than it tastes once it’s been dehydrated on the kale.

This is one of the BEST pesto’s I’ve ever had. It has a buttery flavor to it, I guess it’s something about the basil oil and pumpkin seeds. It makes an awesome mix to go with pasta (be it a raw version of pasta or not). It also is fabulous on a sandwich or just with crackers. Either way, at our housee we adore it. Plus it’s alkaline, raw, simple to make and really really good to eat.

I recommend putting the garlic cloves into the food processor first and turn it on until basically all of them have stopped getting spun around by the blade. Then scrape down the sides and put in the basil. Pulse a few times to get a rough chop, then add in the rest of the ingredients. Some people like their pesto runnier than others, so if you like it more runny, feel free to add in more olive oil.

One of my suggestions when making a kale salad is to tear the kale into small pieces but rub it together and through your hands while you are ripping it apart. It breaks the kale down and makes it much less rough & bitter, it will make the kale brighter green too.
I promise the coconut bacon on this just makes it THAT much better. You want to put it on there. Make some & have left overs!
I don’t put lots of dressing on the salad when it’s in the large bowl, I kind of wait until I’m about to eat it and put it over the top then add the coconut bacon.

Salad: In a large bowl, put the torn kale. After the quinoa is cooked and has cooled for at least 5 minutes, add it over the top of the kale and toss with 1/2 cup of the strawberry vinaigrette. Now add the rest of the salad ingredients over the top, except the coconut bacon (save that for when it is plated). Drizzle with a bit of the dressing.

I was looking through some old recipes that I hadn’t made in quite a while and decided that this Luau Salad could use some revamping and then it would be on the menu for dinner tonight. If you don’t know, kale holds up great for a salad that you want to have the next day (or a few days later) and not have a gross wilted sad mess of a salad. IF you are planning on having left overs, either don’t use romaine in it, or just mix in the romaine just before serving. Watercress would go great in place of it, or you could just do another leaf or two of kale.
Make sure that you “massage” the kale before all the ingredients get added in, it will make a world of difference for the taste. Rubbing it through your hands makes it much less hardy, and far more pleasant to eat.

For Dressing: put all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. Leave in blender bowl, because you will pour it directly onto the salad.

In a medium bowl, combine salad ingredients in italics. Put torn kale in a LARGE bowl, rub it between your hands for about 30 seconds to a minute to break down a lot of the toughness that kale has. After quinoa is done cooking, allow to sit for 5 min before removing the lid. After the 5 min, take off the lid, pour half of the salad dressing over the kale then dump the quinoa over the top of that & mix. It will make the quinoa stick to the kale rather than just all falling to the bottom of the bowl.

Next mix in the cabbage with the kale/quinoa. Dump out contents of the medium bowl on top of the cabbage/kale/quinoa, then pour the rest of the dressing over the top. Mix it and make sure that it’s fully coated.
Next toss in romaine (or spinach).

Dry toast the coconut by heating a frying pan to medium-low & putting the coconut on, but make sure it’s spread evenly. After a little less than 2 min, move around the coconut to make sure it doesn’t burn. Stir around for another minute or two and then remove from heat and top on salad with whatever other garnishments you desire.

These little yummies don’t look like anything special, but once you have them, you usually can’t stop eating them. The first time I made them for my mom she jokingly called be “devil child” for making something so yummy and easy to snack on. Its caramel popcorn meets rice krispie treat. The camarel portion can absolutely be used to make some heavenly caramel popcorn!

I’m posting the healthier version, but also the more pricey and a bit more rare ingredients recipe. But, if you go with that I put in parenthesizes, it will turn out just fine and cheaper. Coconut oil acts like vegan butter, and coconut sugar acts like brown sugar in this recipe. So, easily switched. Also, it doesn’t have to be puffed millet, it can be puffed rice, puffed kamut, puffed wheat, or even a rice krispie type cereal.

pressed into the pan. I generally wait like 1 min after its all pressed, before digging into it!

In a small pot over med-low heat add the oil and sugar. Mix well, and add in brown rice syrup. Keep stirring, it will come to a boil, turn heat to low as you are still stirring. Let it boil for 4 min, stirring randomly so it doesn’t stick to the bottom or burn.
Cut the heat & mix in the soda. There will be a chemical reaction when it mixes, so it will bubble up and become a lighter brown. Then mix in the vanilla.

In a brownie pan, pour the puffed millet. Follow up with the caramel sauce and mix it all together. Once the caramel has coated the millet, press it into the pan.

**Sometimes I mix other things into it, like nuts, coconut and or dried fruit. I have mixed in chocolate chips a few times as well, but you have to know they won’t really stay chips, it will turn into more of chocolate streaks, the caramel melts the chocolate. It goes very well being melted on top though, like chocolate frosting!

So here is my take on the oh so wonderful coconut bacon. There are a decent amount of recipes out there. I used coconut aminos so as to avoid the mass amount of sodium in soy sauce, and to avoid unfermented soy that is Braggs liquid aminos. Personal preference really. But coconut aminos don’t have as deep of a salty profile as soy sauce does, so salt gets added to the recipe.I used 2 different flavors of liquid smoke to give it a bit more depth. I used Colgin brand of liquid smoke, they have both hickory flavor and mesquite flavor, and are vegan. I hear that there are some liquid smokes on the market that aren’t vegan.

In a medium bowl, mix together all ingredients, except for coconut.Combine coconut flakes with wet mixture. Stir the coconut around to get it entirely coated. Let sit and soak in for 30 minutes or more, I did it for about an hour.
Heat the oven to 325°F.
Grease a foil lined baking sheet and pour everything from the bowl onto it. Spread the coconut out in a thin layer. Bake for about 18-20 min, pull out every 5-6 min and mix the coconut then slide together in a pile, then spread back out into a thin layer. This will prevent burning as well as make sure all of the coconut bacon is equally cooked.
You will see the coconut start to darken considerably on the 3rd time you pull it out, make sure the darker coconut is closer to the center than the edge. Coconut bacon is done when they’ve all browned a medium amount.
When you take it out of the oven, the coconut will still be somewhat soft/pliable but will quickly harden up as it cools down. Shouldn’t take but a few minutes until you can enjoy the crunchy goodness!